Shoreless.org

Delicious beef dinners created by Iron Chef Bruce! The first was tonight's dinner of Hamburg steak with Garlic Butter, Caramelized Onions/Capsicums, Pear Jam and Roasted Potatoes!

The second was Steak with Roasted Potatoes and Salad. Yummy!

WTF is this shit? More funny than scary but more sad than anything else. Some scenes where Pinhead is 'badass' but not enough to make up for the times when he is kind of lame. The script is stupid and the acting is cringeworthy.

Forget it. If you want to watch a horror film that's super dumb and hilarious, get Wishmaster instead.

Went to Sembawang Beach to eat at the Beaulieu House a few days ago. No photos of food but we took a short walk into the now defunct Kampung Wak Hassan and found some interesting things.

Released one year after the original Hellraiser, Hellbound is much less scary, much more silly and makes Pinhead look like a pansy to build up some ridiculous new Cenobite who CONSTANTLY makes doctor puns. Plus, they remove a lot of the Cenobites' mystique by making them human and depicting their realm as 'hell'. They try to make up for the Cenobites not being scary anymore by putting in a bunch of gory stuff and making girls run up and down corridors for what seems like forever.

Watchable but kind of crappy.

The Barker-directed adaptation of his own novella The Hellbound Heart is still incredibly scary a couple of decades after its release. The best horror at least makes a stab at being incomprehensible to mere mortals and the Cenobites achieve this really well, while still fitting the mould of scary mary monster villain nicely. Effects are a bit dated but the atmospheric direction makes the house look smaller than it really is. Nowhere to hide from the theologians of the order of the Gash!

Van Morrison has an ugly. ugly voice (to me, at least) so he makes up for it by producing some of the most incredibly beautiful music ever. The strings and guitars grab you from the beginning of this album and when he says, "We are going to Heaven," it's impossible not to believe him and lo behold! You end up in a startling landscape of pink clouds and fresh green grass and blue blue skies that stretch on forever where the jagged voice becomes an essential part of everything, Adam in the garden of Eden.

My personal favourite off this is the absolutely sublime Sweet Thing but every song is beautiful, really. I think the most fitting word to describe this would be Pastoral, in the most idealized, Platonic form.

My favourite, favourite, favouritest adaptation of Batman to date. Great film noir feel, intelligent storytelling, animation that doesn't look dated and Harley Quinn whee!! Also, Mark Hamill's Joker kind of beats the shit out of Heath Ledger's.

Great episodes: The Laughing Fish, Harley & Ivy, Harley's Holiday, Deep Freeze, If You're So Smart Why Aren't You Rich?, Perchance To Dream, Mad Love, Riddler's Reform

Harley & Ivy is the sweetest though! Oh yummy lesbian supervillian action, please happen onscreen!

History Channel documentary that is, honestly, quite useless. Pop psychologists explain away Nolan's Batman. Achieves nothing except making you want to watch Batman Begins and Batman: The Dark Knight again.

Except I already watched all of them a gajillion times. And I still can't overcome this compulsion. FUCK.

Sometimes you should watch a total downer to balance out your media world view. Given how much I love films that glorify gang violence, it's apt that I watch a film that makes it seem like the most horrific thing in the world.

One of the most depressing things I'd ever heard was that most gang members in LA don't leave a ten block radius because its too dangerous for them. It's less about the violence than it is a completely suffocating, claustrophobic outlook and Gomorra, about Italian gangs, has this in spades. The people there inhabit a world quite apart from the sharp suits of The Godfather. It's dirty, life-threatening, unjust and, most of all, ugly as sin.

Despite the fact that there are one too many stories being told and it can get terribly confusing at times, the film makes up for it with beautiful cinematography. Definite recommendation.

Spent re-reading and re-watching Watchmen. It's pretty interesting how characters who are obvious send-ups of the problems with existing superheroes still manage to gather strong followings. It's also pretty funny because the guy who plays Rorschach speaks in a total Christian-Bale-Batman voice.

Anyway, a couple of days ago I thought something interesting to do might be to start a database of shopping malls in Singapore. If there is any culture to be found on this tiny island, it probably lies in the surfeit of malls we have around us. The normalizing, liminal, commercial cocoon seems like the perfect environment for our self-serving, apathetic society. I'm not sure what I hope to get out of it but I'm very sure it will help me understand this country more.

Actually, a better idea would be to do a proper design for this website. Urr... ?